Michael B. Wakin

Michael B. Wakin is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. Dr. Wakin received a B.S. in electrical engineering and a B.A. in mathematics in 2000 (summa cum laude), an M.S. in electrical engineering in 2002, and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 2007, all from Rice University. He was an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Caltech from 2006-2007, an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan from 2007-2008, and a Ben L. Fryrear Associate Professor at Mines from 2015-2017. His research interests include signal/information processing and machine learning using sparse, low-rank, tensor, and manifold-based models.

In 2007, Dr. Wakin shared the Hershel M. Rich Invention Award from Rice University for the design of a single-pixel camera based on compressive sensing. In 2008, Dr. Wakin received the DARPA Young Faculty Award for his research in compressive multi-signal processing for environments such as sensor and camera networks. In 2012, Dr. Wakin received the NSF CAREER Award for research into dimensionality reduction techniques for structured data sets. In 2014, Dr. Wakin received the Excellence in Research Award for his research as a junior faculty member at Mines. In 2021, Dr. Wakin was elevated to IEEE Fellow. In 2025, Dr. Wakin received the Elbert K. Fretwell Award for Outstanding Educators from Scouting Colorado for his K-12 outreach including the STEM Kit program. Dr. Wakin is a recipient of the Best Paper Award and the Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He has served as an Associate Editor for both IEEE Signal Processing Letters and IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing and as a Senior Area Editor for IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.